Okay, high modernist inflected pop. The album cover is Manitoba's _Stop Breaking my Heart_ or rather Caribou's _Stop Breaking my Heart_ which is sort of weird because the same album and same cover is released under two different band names, which already sort of aligns it with Kenny Goldsmith's brand of conceptualism somehow. Here is the cover:
Okay, and now my brain has reconciled it all. The reconciliation is, drumroll, of course it is, TRANSLATION! Yay! Yaya! Sure. So like take Kasey's mentioning of "smurf fisting".. Now aside from all the moral implications, or rather the super cool Zizekian references to avatariality in thought that Zizek makes in works like 2000, The Art of the Ridiculous Sublime: On David Lynch's Lost Highway, Washington: University of Washington Press. More or less he says thought and thinking has become cartoon like, and video-game like, and that that represents an opportunity for ideology to experiment, and or/ do what it has always done, with glee, kill and repress, which is sort of its function in a sick way. Anyway. But you can sort of translate "smurf fisting" into something like a Modernist painting called _Two Krsna-blue glyph beings furiously communicating_ and I could do a Bryce painting to illustrate that. Now that is one way of dealing with such an id-inflected pop image. But there is something fishy about flarf and about contemporary conceptual writing. There is some lingering apologetics one gets from the literary community as if there is some implicit imperative to a moral reading of these things. And my answer to this has to be both Snarky and completely conceptual. Look at the word "Moral".. or better yet, look at Jan Mukarovsky's essay called
ART AS SEMIOLOGICAL FACT
and consider the question: Is poetry, and indeed, the literary arts included in what is traditionally called the Geisteswissenschaften (or Moral Sciences)? I would say yes, but not because Poetry deals in a fruitful way with morality, but because it deals with signs. This is essentially why I think the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E folks had the germ of the baroque unity of the arts, but essentially fell back into what one might call 'tribal practices'.. Much like the Jews, whose old testament is essentially a tribal document about a tribal god, the Langue folks could not give up their old gods, but looked into semiotics and said,, hmm Barthes, he almost seems fastidious and boring enough to be one of OUR kind of poets, so hence, we have the more or less slow synchretism of the poetry world. Like finally someone said, yeah, well, we can just be as odd as whatever.. but we shan't have Deleuze? and we certainly don't want these weirdo Estonians in the mix.. Uexkull? No thank you. Now this is just sort of how I see the thing. Here it is, 2010, and people are still going on about these old farts. Well, they ARE interesting, BUT, a single album cover taken at random from literally billions is possibly just as interesting. What is the model of that? Well, of course, it's called "Cultural Studies" in the academic parlance. And in a lot of colleges "Cultural Studies" are looked down on, but aside from "Pop", "Cultural Studies" is one of the main linkages between Flarf and Conceptualism. And then look at the Art world, Flarf is more or less echoing the main stream of Art discourse right now. If we take "Smurf Fisting" as an exemplar and compare that to Paul McCarthy's spectacular public sculpture entitled "Santa Claus with Buttplug" (2007) we can get a sense of the overarching ethos to which both Flarf and Conceptual art belong in our contemporary scene. What I am trying to do is say, more or less like Jan Mukarovsky says in his essay, is that these things transcend blanket psychological states and are indeed Semiological facts that have varied consequences, ie determination is a medium, an event, and event-science is actually far more hip than Geisteswissenschaften.. But, event science, is phenomenology, and what has phenomenology done but provide a framework for the applied sciences? We are still tending to separate our discourses, and to ghettoize our products, and that isn't necessarily a bad thing. Ghettos tend to make weird creepy folk-tales, and let's face it, at this point, the world as it gets smaller and smaller in a Virilio sense begins to look more and more like a ghetto, and that is another echo between flarf and conceptual poverty. Not that you'll be poor if you are literary artist, but that things like over-determination have echoes in poverty. and that overproduction is like overdetermination. Arte Povera looked at these issues. Flarf could be considered a version of Arte Povera in the sense of SOME of its materials. This KG~Conceptualism could be considered a version of Arte Povera because of its poverty of techniques, and its reliance on cultural studies and hermeneutics to make its meaning ie it TOTALLY relies on the idea of ART considered as semiological fact and makes fun of itself in a way by continuing to fetishize "some fact" which is more or less harkening WAY BACK to the idea of bracketing and sampling found in the earliest Modernist impulses to collage, and to use things in themselves for affect and for effect the exemplus of using the AFFECT / EFFECT schemata is of course Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp peepee vase was sort of shocking. But now, we have like Matthew Barney who is like Marcel Duchamp crossed with Obiwan Kenobi in Zizek-world, or something. Anyhoo. I guess I get what I'm saying, but maybe no one else will see what I mean. Neem tree. Please oil your feet to keep them soft. Like Allen Ginsburg. Can you imagine all these people as Smurfs? It would be kind of funny to see a smurf caricature of every single person on earth, and then to see them as blue glyphs in a pluroma of mystery still unfolding
at a constant rate according to specific physical principles, something like
Picasso with a blue-lipped vagina in his forehead spitting primary colored Star Trek Food.
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I just saw Cremaster 3 at the Seattle International Film Festival last Saturday. I was going to see 1 & 2 on Sunday, but when I went to my car to drive there, my car was no longer there. 3 days later, my car reappeared, minus its windows, its dashboard, its transmission, its engine, and with some other cars body panels on it in some places, like a fucking interchangable, cross-dressing CYBORG! Its shell was intact, except for the holes where the windows were that were leaking rain into the damp interior, but the car was incapable of self-sustained motion. I'm not sure if the gas tank was still in place or not, but if it was, it had become a solely vestigal organ. An event had taken definitely place. A kind of pagan, technologically mediated festival of dissemblage. My mind slipped back to the film and the scene in the cupola of the chrysler building where the automotive shell around dillinger's disinterred female corpse had been taken for some alchemical realignment, apparently. My car's transmution was similarly total, in fact, is just now being certified as legally "totalled," as in "total loss." This whole process was begun between my actual attendance at Cremaster 3, and the probabalistic ghost me, that was, in fact, going to be present in the theater Sunday morning for parts 1 & 2. If not for the car's disappearance, I would now have had the experience of 1 & 2, which was disturbed in space-time by the factual events which effected my ability to attend the film. So what does all this mean? At least that these cars may be entangled in things that we cannot understand or control. Really enjoyed reading this essay of yours. Did you ever get a chance to listen to those ph0n0n mp3s? Cheers! Chris
ReplyDeleteoh, and i meant gary gilmore, not john dillinger in the comment above. gary gilmore ran a car theft ring when he lived in Portland, which adds an interesting resonance to having my car stolen right after watching the movie. fate?
ReplyDeletealso, did you know that dan wieden of wieden & kennedy claims to have gotten the inspiration for nike's slogan "just do it" from gary gilmore's statement at the time of his execution, "let's do it." i'm right now sitting in a cubicle opposite the nephew of the original designer of the nike swoosh......
ReplyDeletetriskelions, baby!
I need to do whatever you say Chris!
ReplyDelete:)
What an awesome story! Crap man, I am sorry about your ride! Kara had a car stole in college and they burned it to a crisp. But also, in college, I was really stoned, and sleep walked out of my house and stole a car in my sleep thinking it was mine. The next day, embarassed, my room mates telling me what i had done. I had it towed, and denied the whole episode. I finally found the guy who had lost it, and he said he had left the keys in it for months to see how long it would take before some one drove off with it. He never reclaimed the car.
And I got a wonderful
solid silver brooch
from that car
that was a boar's head
which surmounted a banderole which read
NEOBLIVISCARUS
or "Forget Not"
And then now, I have sort of really bad memory problems..
At any rate, my partner at work for years had been the next boyfriend
to gary gilmore's girlfriend.
He had some odd stories about it,
but I don't remember any of them!
:)
that's a really awesome story about accidentally stealing that car! mia and i had a good laugh about this one time that i went to the store and when i came back out to the car there was another camry that was identical to mine parked next to it. i walked up to the wrong one, put the key in, and tried to turn it. it didn't turn at first, so i did my usual "key wiggle" that will sometimes get a stubborn lock to work. it opened right up. i got in the car, sat down, and then was like, "wait a minute..." that car had cloth interior instead of the leather one, and i was like, "oh shit! i'm in the wrong car!" kind of funny how the key for my car worked in it with just a little jimmying.
ReplyDelete